Cheerful bench at Palo Verde Park (Murals being made, part 69)

When you're in Palo Verde Park at Palo Verde Pool (which has a mural outside), walk west to the northwest corner of the park. You'll find a bench painted by Angela Pittenger. Here are the north (front side), then the south side:

Closeups around the bench:

In the last photo above, her signature is at the bottom right:

Just by chance, I found Angela's email address after I took those photos on April 26th. I wrote and asked if she'd share some info about the mural and maybe photos of it being painted. She did! Here's what she wrote and five photos of one part being painted:

The Palo Verde Park Neighborhood has been trying to improve the neighborhood and asked me to come up with a bright, happy, flowery design for that little wall to liven up the playground area. I incorporated a bee and a butterfly because they put in a pollinator garden so it ties the whole park together.

Once I drafted an idea, they took it to the City for approval and then raised funds to pay for it. Members of the Palo Verde Park Neighborhood went to work preparing the wall, which took a lot of work. They scraped and torched it to get it smooth enough to paint.

I painted it on my own. The handprints on the opposite side were done by children from Kellond Elementary School, which is next to the park. It really makes it a kids’ space and creates a sense of whimsy and playfulness. The wall was very chipped and dull before I painted the mural. That wall has always kind of been a gathering spot for parents while their kids play. I know I spent many hours sitting there when my son was little. It’s really cool to help improve the park that I love in such a joyous way. Kids love it. They look at all the flowers and get excited when they find the lady bug that’s painted on there.

Let's finish with five photos Angela sent. They show how she painted the flower at the center of the first photo (the north side of the bench) above:

Her website is www.AngelaPittenger.com. Her Instagram is @angelapittenger; you can see some of it without an account, but don't click on any photos or you'll be asked to log in.

Thanks so much, Angela! We'll be showing another of your murals next time.

Mural for sale: $464,900! (home included)

At the northwest corner of Broadway & Bryant is a mural with a home behind it:

That's taken from the northeast corner. Here's the northwest view:

The asking price is just $464,900. Deal! :)

Next, part of the front (north side) of the home. Don't miss the borders around the window and door. (As always, you can click for a slideshow of larger views.)

Let's move east and around the corner to the left edge of the mural, along Bryant Avenue, and see closeups from here until the west end of the mural next to the home:

Flashback to February 17, 2010: There was a different mural. The wall was topped with curved tile. (Now the wall is topped by simulated, painted-on tiles with a fence above.) Here's the northeast corner of the wall back then:

The post Three streets, three murals: #2 shows two more views from that date.

BG Boyd's latest Tucson mural video

BG Boyd Photography has lots of photos and videos (many taken from drones) of Tucson murals. BG posted his video Tucson Murals 10 last week, June 15:



Here's a link to see the video in another window: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atfAlD5StOY.

Goodbye, Sonoran Brunch Company: inside

As I wrote in the previous post Goodbye, Sonoran Brunch Company: outside, Sonoran Brunch Company has closed and its murals are gone. I found Ken Kroeger, who took the photos below, on the Facebook group Tucson Murals and Street Art. The restaurant was tiny, so this mural by Jessica Gonzales must have been overwhelming(ly beautiful)!

(As always, you can click on a photo for a larger view.)

Next, three “close-ups” I made by cropping areas of the photo above:

Thanks so much for preserving this mural, Ken.

Goodbye, Sonoran Brunch Company: outside

I'm sad to say that Sonoran Brunch Company has closed and its murals are gone. It was a tiny restaurant that supported local artists. Ken Kroeger, who took the photos I'll show in a minute, wrote on the Facebook group Tucson Murals and Street Art:

One of the first things that Kenny and Niki King, the owners of Sonoran Brunch Company, did when they opened in 2019 is had Jessica Gonzales paint a large mural on the inside of the old Poco and Mom's {New Mexican restaurant], that was three years ago. For being a rather small local business they believed in supporting the Tucson Mural Scene and had two more large murals [outside] done by Danny Martin and Serena Rios McRae.

A little more than two years after the Covid-19 outbreak upended life in the world, SBC sadly shut its doors.

We showed Danny Martin's mural on October 29, 2019. It was painted on a metal storage container located just south of the restaurant. David Aber also spotted a truck painted by Danny Martin; we posted it in Mobile Mural.

On January 20 of this year, Ken Kroeger took photos of two halves of the metal storage container. It had been repainted by Serena Rios McRae of Cactus Clouds Art. (Bookmans on Speedway tweeted April 27th about Serena Rios McRae, who was there April 29: “Serena focuses her artistic energy towards uplifting women. Her intimate relationship with the desert inspires her watercolors and other works.”) She turned it into a monsoon storm raining food:

(The first photo, of the left half, is wider than the second photo, of the right half. So the second photo seems to be taller, but it's actually the same height.)

A few details:

This is the kind of monsoon I'm waiting for. :)

When I stopped by on June 7, all that was left of the storage container was a light spot on the pavement:

I (Jerry Peek) have always wanted to make an online list of local businesses that support Tucson artists — for instance, painting murals or hanging artists' art on their walls. There's too little time and too much art! If you know of a list like this that already exists, or have the determination and stamina to maintain a list like that, please use the contact form in the right column of this blog; I'll spread the word!

CYFI in Dubai

Tucson's own Rock Martinez (CYFI) paints all over the world. I just found this mural — a tribute to the Colombian singer Shakira — on his Instagram account @cyfione. It's at the restaurant called Soul Street in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (if you haven't heard of Dubai, click there for a Google Map).

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CYFI (@cyfione)

(To see another part of the mural, on a computer click the arrow in the circle at the right edge; on a phone, swipe. Notice CYFI on the car's license plate.)

Here's info I found on https://soul.st/about/: “Soul Street is a restaurant in Dubai that promotes street art. The eclectic mix of street art, graffiti and pop-art throughout, has been designed by five of the hottest street artists from around the globe. All murals embody the heart and soul of the street food styles represented within the restaurant.”

Congrats, CYFI, for being called one of “five of the hottest street artists from around the globe.”

Corner With Charm II

This mural begins on the north wall of the residence at 268 E. Delano St.  The mural then turns the corner onto the east wall along north Fontana Ave.  A previous mural along this same wall appeared here: Corner with charm.

This first part of the mural is on the front wall (north) of the house at 268 E. Delano St.

The following parts are on the east wall along N. Fontana Ave.

The artist is not known.

Click on any photo for a slideshow of larger images.

Mural mystery tours: StemAZing

A traditional mural tour has a photo of each mural along the route. The STEMAZING Tucson mural tours have a fun twist: photos that show the area around the mural, but with the mural itself blanked out. For example:

The photos come from Google Street View. The Director of The STEMAZING Project, in the the Pima County School Superintendent's Office, is DaNel Hogan (click there to read about her). She sent me the story of the project:

I spend quite a lot of time putting the Tucson Mural Quest together for a workshop for teachers we did called STEM Quest: A Colorful Exploration of Perception. As we have so many and a growing number of murals in Tucson, it already needs updating. I have really focused on what I call the walkable zone – the murals on 4th Ave and Downtown Tucson. I need to add a few more I missed but there are over 60 murals along about a five mile walk, as I am sure you know. … I call mine the only “no spoilers” mural guide. I am planning to add mural keys to each one when I get a chance. These are close up images of a piece of the mural so folks can be even more certain they have found the right one.

Here's a link to the Tucson Mural Quest page:

    https://stemazing.org/mural-quest/

(STEM stands for “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.”) Happy hunting!

BG Boyd's amazing mural database

Aerial and ground photographer BG Boyd takes videos and photos from drones and from land. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've seen some of his work.

When he answered a question on Facebook, I saw that he'd linked to a part of his website I'd forgotten about. It's a searchable database of 150+ murals he's photographed. The top looks like this (click if you'd like a larger view):

The top level of the database is here:

    https://bgboydphoto.com/murals

I keep coming across more collections of Tucson murals. I'm aiming to post another one tomorrow. If you have any favorites, please use the "Contact Us" boxes at the right margin of this blog to let us know.

Uncle Bob's Fourth Mural

Uncle Bob repairs VWs and sells used ones.

The mural on E. Glenn St. at N. Stone Ave. has appeared in this Blog on three other times in 2008,  2010 and 2012

Here is the current mural followed by two detailed views:

Unfortunately, the artist is not known.

Click on any photo for a slideshow of larger images.

Strange Pack Animals And Cargo

The mural is on the south wall of Beyond Cabinets as seen from E. Broadway Blvd.  "The houses-on-javelinas are a tribute to the relocating of some historic bungalows as the widening work on Broadway just east of downtown continues..."

By Porter McDonald

Click on the photo for a larger image.

ULTM Clothing

ULTM Clothing, which occupies half of the building at 3919 S. 12th, has a mural that I'm showing in three pieces here, from left (north) to right (south):

I was there on April 3rd, a mural-hunting trip along South 12th.

If you think it's hot in Tucson...

…the capital of our neighbor to the south — Hermosillo, Sonora — may be hotter. The thermometer that's blowing its top is part of a mural along Calle Pino Suárez.

Like most of the rest of the world, Mexico uses temperatures in Celsius. A temperature of 20C is 68F. A temperature of 66C, as this thermometer showed before it blew its top, is 150F. Hmmm.

The thermometer is at the left edge of the city map mural below.

And that mural is at the right (closest) end of a mural gallery, partly hidden behind a tree:

The sign on the barrier in front of the parking lot translates as “Sure, there will be sun tomorrow.”

I was there on March 29th when the temperature was only 27C. (I don't know what it will be today, but I'm glad I'm in “cool” Tucson now!)

Meat, bread, tortillas, and deer dancers

A long strip mall along South 12th Avenue has two stores at the same address: Mercadito La Unica, which sells meat, bread, and tortillas; and Alejandro's Tortilla Factory, which makes… you guessed it. I stopped by on April 3rd because I'd taken a bus to Mexico from the same shopping center during March, and I'd noticed the murals and signs interspersed across the top of the businesses:

The man's head with a deer's head on top looked familiar. Oh, I remember: I rode a bus from the Tucson location of the Mexican bus company Tufesa, farther along the same shopping center. Tufesa's logo is a deer dancer:

I asked a friend about that. He said it's a deer dancer (in the Yaqui language, maso). I searched online and found that the deer dance is part of the culture in Sonora and Arizona. In case you're interested, here's some of what I found:

• Images of maso "deer dancer" from DuckDuckGo (a privacy-oriented search engine)
• A Wikipedia page titled Yaqui music that covers the dance in Wikipedia's usual amount of detail
• A page from Encyclopedia Britannica with the first section titled “maso dance: Native American dance”
• A page from the Pascua Yaqui tribe called Ceremonies of the Yaqui with a section titled “The Mazo Kova Pahko (Deer Head) Ceremony” (maybe Mazo is the same as maso?)

I found this sculpture in a shopping area of Hermosillo, Sonora in March 2022.

About the rattles, the Britannica page above says: “In addition to container rattles, Native Americans make rattles from small objects strung together in clusters; these objects include deer hooves, seashells, seeds, seed pods, nuts, fruit pits, …”

End of lesson, class. :)

Cyfi, graffiti writer, ten years between

(Note: The Arizona Daily Star lets non-subscribers read only a couple of its free articles before you need to log in.)

Rock “Cyfi” Martinez travels the world painting murals. He started out in Tucson, years ago, writing illegal graffiti. I just found this 2018 article from the Arizona Daily Star: How Tucson artist Rock Martinez evolved from tagger to muralist

It reminded me of another article I saw years ago. I found it, too, from 2008: Local graffiti artist Cyfi has turned his hobby into a career

In between, Cyfi organized the WintaFresh urban art weekend. It drew artists from all over the US. You can see some of the art over the years in the 1240 North Stone section of this blog's page Layers of murals: histories of a few walls.